The magician's secrets

It was one thing to have spent your life in love with a man who could not return the favor, but it was another thing entirely to love a man you didn’t even know.

Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant

For Sabine, the beautiful magician’s assistant, both of these things turn out to be true. She loved Parsifal, the magician, almost from the time he made her part of his act, and in time he married her. Yet he never loved her in the way he loved Phan, the wealthy Vietnamese man he slept with every night while Sabine slept alone. His marriage was just a part of his act.

As The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett’s 1997 novel, begins, Sabine is alone in that big California house that is now hers. Both men have died, Phan from AIDS and Parsifal from a brain aneurism. Her husband had told her he was an orphan from Connecticut with no remaining family. Now she learns his mother and two sisters have been living in Nebraska all this time and that his real name was Guy Fetters.

Why had he lied to her? The mystery deepens when his mother, Dot Fetters, and one sister, Bertie, having been notified of his death by a lawyer, come to California to meet the wife they didn’t even know he had. Sabine finds them to be pleasant, quite ordinary women. So why had he pretended they didn't even exist?

A magician knows how to hide secrets, but a magician's assistant learns those secrets as she learns the act. Often she is the one who makes the magic happen while the magician waves his arms and keeps the audience focused elsewhere. And so Sabine, when she later visits the Fetters home in Nebraska, gradually learns the secrets Parsifal had tried so hard to keep hidden.

That home had been marked by discord and violence when Guy Fetters was a boy, and so it is now. Where before it was his father who was the source of the trouble, now it is Howard, the husband of Kitty, the older sister who looks so much like Parsifal. Howard's very presence in the house seems to put everyone on edge.

Sabine turns out to be a pretty good magician in her own right, but her most challenging trick may be trying to bring peace to this broken family, whose idea of a good time is watching a tape of an old Johnny Carson show on which Parsifal and Sabine had appeared years before. They watch it every night almost as an act of worship. Their idea of a night out is going to Wal-Mart. "It's a very romantic place, really," Kitty tells her.

While Sabine works her magic on the Fetters family, the family works its own magic on her, easing her sense of loss and abandonment.

This was Patchett's third novel, and two decades later it holds up very well.